Smart glasses from Toshiba take a different design track

The brand has decided not to use the over-the lens prism that was selected for Google Glass.

The latest brand to have their eye – so to speak – on the smart glasses market appears to be Toshiba, which has just finished revealing their prototype in Japan at the Ceatec trade show.

While these wearables may not be ready to bump Google Glass out of the running, price may be in their favor.

So far, it looks as though the smart glasses that could be offered by Toshiba would be a bit more affordable than Google Glass, which comes with a hefty price tag, at the moment. They are currently calling this wearable technology device Toshiba Glass. While they do include a built-in projector, they are unlike the current front runner in this category in that the image that they display is simply reflected off the inside of the lens in order to provide the wearer with a kind of augmented reality display experience.

This makes the idea similar to Google’s smart glasses, but at the same time, they are rather different.

The Toshiba wearables feature a lightweight, small projector that is clipped onto one of the arms of the eyewear, close to the lens. It is that projector that reflects the image off the lens for the viewer to see in augmented reality. Google’s option also uses a projector, but its design is different in that it uses a prism over the lens in order to reflect the projected image to be seen by the wearer’s eye.

The product from Toshiba skips the use of the prism and has constructed the lens, itself, to be made up of a series of slim vertical prisms that are essentially invisible while looking directly through the lens as you would as you went about your daily routines. However, it allows an image to be projected upon them from an angle so that the wearer will be able to see it.

The specs from the company state that the device, as a whole, weighs about the same as Google Glass, at 42 grams. That said, they aren’t quite up to that level, particularly in that they are not wireless, as a battery in the projector would make the weight too high.